This is what happens when an engineer and a crafts-person buy an old house.

Notes, images and inspiration for the renovation of a 1935 Flemish townhouse.

Saturday, 18 October 2014

Another update

I'll probably post after this weekend, but here goes this for the last few days.

Didn’t post last weekend. We worked on the same things, mostly. The attic plastering is done, and I washed the brick wall with warm water and soap. This didn’t remove all the dust, but a lot of grime.

We’ve since vacuumed all the walls, and primed the bricks and the plaster (a spirit-y primer for dusty undergrounds, it feels -and smells- like thinned down glue). This really seemed to fix the dustyness problem on the bricks! Today I painted, with Pim's help on the tipmost, highest corner. Ran out of white paint. More pictures soon.

Something that feels like an achievement is the installing of the glass enclosure for the shower! I had lots of concerns but it worked out allright.

Here are a few older pictures, when we were setting up the shower tray:

Mounting wooden sides to tile over
We used different products for mounting, elastic or firm, depending on the needs of the area

Tiling over the shower tray and the strip of plastic that makes it watertight

Attaching the aluminium profile where the glass is secured

Perhaps the most critical moment was carrying the very large, very heavy sheet of glass upstairs. There were also some loose plastic strips that go between the glass and the aluminium profile, and they have to sort of magically stay in place while you insert the glass in the profile, or the profile on the glass. Very puzzling, but Pim solved it by putting a fell dollops of glue here and there and putting the strips in a strategival formation, and that worked. It would have been better if the glue would have been transparent instead of white, since the strips are also transparent, silicon perhaps, but the residue is barely visible anyway. And the aluminium profile is lackered white (lucky that there was an option aside from silvery - black was available as well).

The striped glass is very cool I think! it does play some tricks on the eyes when combined with the grout lines of the tiles, but I am already getting used to it.

The enclosure is not actually completely closed. This is more of a “step-in” shower. We’ve had a very bad experience with (sliding) doors in our current shower, and didn’t want to touch one with a 9 foot pole. Granted, it is probably the worst quality you can possibly find (plastic everything, which degrades very fast and is impossible to keep clean, and including the moving parts, which of course break all the time). I’ve still come to hate them so much that I didn’t even want to try a better quality enclosure with doors. Moving parts are bound to break sooner or later anyway.
Before this, I had only experienced curtained bathtubs, which also get annoying when the curtain sticks to you -_-

Yay!

Firmly secured

So this enclosure is just a couple of sheets of glass, one large along the sower tray (which is 140 cm long), and another 33 cm wide (one third of the width of the short side of the shower) which stands at right angles with the large glass. We took the model with a corner out of concern for splatters. There’s an aluminium profile against the wall and another at the corner where both panes meet. There’s also a small block of aluminium holding the small glass in place against the shower tray, and an aluminium arm over the top, grabbing the large glass and fixing it to the wall opposite.

Attached to the shower tray

To attach the small block to the shower tray, we had to make a hole in it. I was concerned about this since the shower tray is enamelled steel plate, and as an enameller I only know too well how enamel can crack under pressure. The trays available in the shop where we bought the enclosure were all acrylic and composite stone, which pose no problem.
So I took my small diamond tool (as used by dentists) and removed the layer of enamel before Pim perforated the steel. Perhaps overkill, but worked like a charm :)

Once everything is in place, the structure is very rigid and secure, even though it looks airy. I hope it is not too airy :) it may get drafty in there, being used as we are to a small 90 x 90 cm closed enclosure in a tiny bathroom. The radiator seems to warm up the room very nicely, even though the door is still standing in the stair landing.

Handshower piece

We're also now busy installing the hardware in the shower. This piece had to be shortened a bit, so I sawed a chunk off with my jewellery saw. The saws are thin as hairs, but I am familiar with it and it goes better, more precise, than a hacksaw.